Bishops promote immigration reform

Members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’(USCCB) Committee on Migration will travel to Capitol Hill, May 29, to urge lawmakers in the House of Representatives to act on immigration reform legislation.

According to an article from Catholic News Service, Bishop Eusebio Elizondo, auxiliary bishop of Seattle and chairman of the USCCB Committee on Migration said, “The only real solution to this broken system is action by Congress. We need a debate and vote on this issue. Inaction is equivalent to supporting the status quo, which Americans agree needs to be changed.”

Earlier this year, Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles wrote an article entitled “What can we do now on immigration reform?” in which he wrote:

Since 2008, our government has deported nearly 2 million people and nearly a half million more are locked up in immigration detention centers.

And as I’ve been repeating, these are not just numbers, these are real people. One in every four persons who is being arrested or deported is being ripped out of their homes — taken away from their children, their wives and husbands, all their relatives.

We need to keep reminding our leaders — and our neighbors — about these basic “human facts.” Most of the 11 million undocumented in our country have been living here for five years or more. Two-thirds have been here for at least a decade.

The vast majority pose no criminal danger to our community. Just the opposite. They are going to church and working alongside us, paying taxes, making our country and our communities stronger.
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Any true reform must provide a generous path to citizenship for our 11 million undocumented brothers and sisters. A just and compassionate society can’t allow an underclass of people to keep growing at the margins of our society, living in constant fear of arrest, without rights or reasons to hope.

So let’s keep praying for our country and for our leaders.

And let us ask Mary, our Blessed Mother, to give us the courage to always do what is right and just.

To learn more about the issues of immigration and what you can do, visit the Justice for Immigrants website of the USCCB.